Crowded Mpls. morgue has medical examiner looking to move out of downtown

The Hennepin County medical examiner's office wants to put an end to overcrowding at its morgue in downtown Minneapolis. Officials are hoping to win state funding this spring for a new facility in the suburbs.

The squat concrete building across from the Vikings stadium didn't start out as a morgue.

"The building itself is about 50 years old, and it was a food service facility for many, many years for the county," said Andrew Baker, medical examiner. "And when the opportunity to move into here from our very small location in the hospital came up, we jumped on it."

The basement already contained a giant walk-in refrigerator that could store human remains, the stock-in-trade of the medical examiner and his 35 doctors, investigators and staff.

But 15 years after the relocation, their workload is way up.

"At the time, we were doing approximately 600 autopsies a year, and we have almost doubled that amount now," said Melissa Lallak, the county administrator for the medical examiner's office.

That's due in part to agreements with Scott and Dakota counties, which now contract with Hennepin County for post-mortem medical examinations.

Officials say the population and the number of deaths that require investigation have outgrown the facility.

"Remember the game you played as a kid," asked Baker, "with the 15 squares and the 16-piece plastic party favor? That's what it's like in there, trying to find the right body to release to the funeral director."

Make no mistake — Baker and his staff take their task with solemn seriousness.

"If you're unfortunate enough to have a family member die under medical examiner jurisdiction, we're the people that give you answers about how your loved one died," Baker said. "Whether it's a sudden, unexplained natural death, whether it's a drug overdose. You know, God forbid it should even be a homicide, but all of those cases fall under our jurisdiction."

And that's ultimately the reason Baker says he needs more room: Death investigations are high-stakes procedures, and where they happen matters.

He said his office needs more room to accommodate not just remains but investigators and autopsies, to keep them up to industry standards. Baker said those standards, and accreditation by the National Association of Medical Examiners, give families and authorities confidence that they can quickly know what really happened when someone died.

"If this building right now you are standing in was built to 2013 standards, we would have nine autopsy stations," he said. "We have five. If this building were built to 2013 autopsy facility standards, we'd be able to fit more than 70 bodies in our cooler. We can currently hold about 36. So even by current standards, we're already at capacity. Obviously, the case volume we're going to have in 2040, we're going to be way below capacity."

Officials are looking at about a $60 million project, including land, a facility, fixtures, furniture and equipment. The county is asking the state for $26 million in bonding of that this spring, about half the total.

Baker would like to move his operation to the southern suburbs, preferably along a major highway that makes for easy access — and preferably out of downtown and the shadow of the new Vikings stadium and nearly a billion dollars of other real estate development around it.

The stadium and associated development, he said, are going to affect "our ability to do business and the ability of family members, coroners, funeral directors and law enforcement to reach us."

The facility could be running by 2019.